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Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

The way that Rückert prints this poem it might have been entitled Sie und Er: perhaps this played a part in the composer’s choice of Er und Sie for the next song in the set. The composer found this lyric on page 81 of the second volume of Rückert’s Gesammelte Gedichte (1843) which he owned; there it appears under the fourth section of the Jugendlieder – poems written in Rückert’s early twenties (1810-1813).

Schumann here writes a duet which goes far beyond the Mendelssohnian models of the 1840s. We had an inkling of this new ‘antiphonal’ style in the Burns settings of Op 34. Schumann had a taste for contrapuntally dense (and complex) interwoven conversation in those early pieces, but this is the culmination of what may be termed the anti-duet: the singers seem to sing together while having totally different feelings and emotional agendas. The girl is lighthearted and capricious, determined to have a good time; her words are spoken out loud for all to hear. The boy is sullen, nervous and humiliated; his words are audible to us, but probably not to the girl; in this way his dampening comments are kept to himself rather than spoken aloud. He goes through the motions on the dance floor, but he would rather be anywhere else, and he simply cannot bear the fact that his girlfriend is allowing herself to be touched by all and sundry. She enjoys teasing him, saying that she will be totally his tomorrow, but today belongs to everybody. In this mismatch of temperaments it is obvious that he is more in love with her than she with him. Perhaps she finds him too devoted to be entertaining.

One somehow realises from this that Schumann must have been a thoroughly inept dancer – even if only because the very act of watching other people dancing seems connected with unhappiness whenever it features in his songs: one thinks of Es ist ein Flöten und Geigen, the first song of Der arme Peter, and Der Spielmann; in each case the composer casts himself as the outsider helplessly watching a social ritual which only serves to emphasise his exclusion from the day-to-day life of ordinary people. Clara on the other hand was no doubt physically well co-ordinated, and enjoyed the chance to let her hair down. It is not impossible that this song is a rueful comment on their incompatibility in this one area of their lives. (The disinclination of many musicians to dance is well-known. Perhaps a heightened consciousness of music breeds an awkward self-consciousness on the dance floor; after all, listening is ideally a stationary pastime.)

The music is in ¾ time – a fast waltz perhaps, as the text implies, although a slightly rustic tone to the music suggests a Ländler variation with a structured change of partners. It is the very lack of one-to-one intimacy while dancing which is the source of all the tenor’s anguish. It is this circular array of dancing bodies which is the ‘Kranz’; the girl’s opening lines refer to the lineup of young dancers milling around and waiting for the music to strike up. The accompaniment’s right-hand arpeggio soars upwards to the apex of the tune (a high B) before falling gracefully away. This is swirling music which betokens the soprano’s high spirits, as much as her determination to break free from the cloying possessiveness of her partner; this ascending figuration might even suggest taking centre stage and elbowing someone aside in the process. The sprung dotted rhythms of the left hand energise the music throughout and indicate exuberant physical movement.

As soon as the tenor enters there is a momentary change into the minor key. It is Schumann’s considerable achievement that when he layers this negative reaction with the girl’s cajoling replies she always manages to remain upbeat, he implacably downbeat. Quavers suddenly invade the piano texture, indicative of the man’s pulses racing in panic; those left-hand dotted rhythms suddenly seem just as appropriate to depict his thumping heart. At the girl’s second solo verse (the poem’s third strophe: ‘Eia, der Walzer erklingt’) the music is marked ‘Lebhafter’ as the dance gathers momentum. The word ‘Frisch!’ is cleverly made to appear early, and on its own, as if the young lady were commanding a musical recapitulation of the opening ritornello. This duly appears before the end of the poem’s third strophe, giving the musical structure a sense of a new beginning at an unexpected point. The girl then goes on to the end of her verse, tagging on a recycled mention of the ‘Mädchen und Bübchen’ from the third line of the strophe.

It is Schumann’s plan to blur the demarcation of the strophes and make us lose any sense of direction; it is if we were in the middle of the whirling bodies and giddily attempting to keep up with the ceaseless flow of movement and modulation. (This is at least how the pianist feels!) The tenor launches into ‘Wehe, mir sinket der Arm’ (verse 4) but he has sung only two bars before the girl embarks on the entirely contradictory ‘Eia, wie flattert der Kranz’ (verse 5). The man’s increasingly bitter complaints are now closely interwoven with the girl’s comments in party mood. Words in one stave clash with words in the other; at times it is impossible for the ear to disentangle the threads in performance, save when one or other of the voices emerges from the fray with a solo passage. This is a head-on collision of opposing feelings and Schumann must have had great fun in writing it. It all sounds easy enough, but one cannot emphasise enough the trouble that the composer has taken to superimpose one feeling on the other, major on minor as it were, keeping the sound-world of each character true to itself, while planning their conjunction with the greatest skill. Some of the piano writing in rippling quavers suggests a Chopin waltz, and the increasing density and harmonic richness works up to a fine old frenzy which is entirely typical of this kind of dance.

The song moves to its close with the clever juxtaposition and alternation of two harmonic worlds – the girl’s way-out E flat 7/A flat major for ‘heute für alle im Tanz’ and the boy’s insistence on the proprieties of the home key (D7/G major) for ‘möchte vergehen in Harm’. They eventually compromise in a C major exit from these entrenched positions, leading to an unsettled cadence in the first inversion of G major. The duet comes to a close with an extended cadential passage where the two singers lock horns, clashing in argumentative discords, and seeming to be stuck, on different words (‘morgen’ and ‘mitten’) before they bring the song to an end from completely opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. The girl is cast throughout as lightweight and ‘fast’, the boy as long-suffering and devoted. But he is also a killjoy, and we cannot help liking her better. There is no indication that the emotional chasm between the lovers has been bridged, but the band plays on in the major key. The fourteen-bar postlude reiterates the arpeggio figuration of the introduction; we hear this twice before echoes of that arpeggio, now calmer and lower in the keyboard, bring the music to a close. Two spread chords sign off in G major and leave us in little doubt that the girl has had a good time with no regrets. The listener, despite the tenor’s anguish, feels the same.

He: If I gaze into the quiet valley Where beneath the sun Flowers gleam without number, I see but one alone. Ah! Her blue eyes now Are also gazing at the meadows; I can see them In the dew-drenched forget-me-nots.

She: If I lean out of my little window At the hour when stars are shining, Though all of them be fairer, I see but one alone; There at dusk he gazes Gently up to heaven, For a dear image Is mirrored there.

Schumann found this poem in Die Dichtungen of Justinus Kerner (page 233) published by Cotta of Stuttgart in 1834. The two verses marked ‘He’ and ‘She’ immediately suggested a duet, and he set about the same miracles of ‘layering’ which made Tanzlied (composed a few days earlier) such an unusual masterpiece. Schumann seems to have been thrilled by the possibilities of playing with dialogue, and exploring possible deviations in the seeming unanimity of the well-behaved (or Mendelssohnian) duet form.

In Tanzlied he occupied himself with two different attitudes to life (one open and reckless, the other reserved and cautious) and he counterpointed them to wonderful musical effect. Er und Sie is once again the dialogue of lovers; but this time the problem is physical distance. The two singers are of one mind, but they are separated: they sing to each other across a huge divide. In Tanzlied the lovers had been side by side and estranged; in Er und Sie they are far apart yet united. The composer must have been pleased with the symmetry of this conjunction in his Op 78.

This is one of Schumann’s best-loved duets; it has a melodic charm and freshness which are adorable. Murmuring triplets are the mainstay of the accompaniment which run like a gentle stream throughout the music. Obligato minims and crotchets ping out in melancholy fashion in the pianist’s right hand as if played on an oboe, and then in the left, as if on an answering bassoon. These longer notes resonate as if in the wide open spaces that separate the lovers as they project their longing across ‘das stille Tal’. This is in itself a dialogue where the treble and bass clefs seem to represent the sexes of the two protagonists.

The first four lines of the poem’s opening verse serve as the tenor’s introductory cantilena. This has a beautiful musical shape that stands on its own, and it ends on the words ‘auf Eine’. It is now the soprano’s turn. To the same melody that we have just heard she sings the first four lines of the poem’s second verse. She is looking at the stars through her window, a domestic frame which contrasts with the essentially outdoor setting of the tenor’s words. This ends with the matching phrase ‘auf Einen’. For those unfamiliar with German grammar the phrase ‘blicke ich nur auf Eine’ and ‘auf Einen’ (I look on or at one person) contains the preposition ‘auf’ plus the accusative form of ‘one’: this is ‘eine’ when referring to a woman, and ‘einen’ in the masculine inflection.

Each singer has had their matching statement by way of introduction and now Schumann begins his task of combining their utterances. The tenor begins with ‘Ach! Es blickt ihr Auge blau’ (the fifth line of his strophe); but he has only reached ‘ihr’ when the soprano dovetails with her ‘Dort gen Abend blickt Er mild’ – words which are taken for the fifth line of her strophe. This represents a build-up of poignant feeling which is beautifully imagined from the musical point of view. It is only the comprehensibility of the words which is in danger; these are placed one on top of the other in such a way that it is almost impossible to follow their meaning. When ‘eine’ and ‘einen’ are sung simultaneously it is impossible to tell which singer is singing which word.

The result is a rhapsody of beguiling sound and harmony rather than a conventional lied. By the end of the second page of music all Kerner’s words have been used up. After a cadence (marked ‘etwas zurückhaltend’) the tenor goes back to the beginning of the poem for another ‘Seh’ ich in das still …’ At this point the soprano takes over with an answering ‘Tret’ ich an mein Fenster …’. These exchanges interrupt each other in mid-sentence as indicated, and bounce off the stave like twinned echoes which ricochet ecstatically across the valleys; the first syllable of the word ‘Sonnenscheine’ shines gloriously at the top of the tenor’s stave, as does the answering ‘Sterne scheinen’ of the soprano. It is the softer aspect of starlight which seems evoked in the writing immediately afterwards where the combination of the two voices is gently translucent. Soprano and tenor are entwined and woven together in close harmony; if the physical distance between them still pertains this has been surmounted by the power of the imagination.

If this music were less beautiful we might object to the fact that Schumann uses the words ‘blick’ ich nur auf eine’ (and ‘einen’) again and again in repetition that is reminiscent of the corniest operatic peroration. With these words he seems to be emphasising his own complete commitment to his marriage; whatever strains there were with Clara during their years together, there was never a question of Robert’s casting a cupidinous glance in the direction of another woman. He was the one for her. The composer now simply plays with his material, as if unwilling to let go of such happy inspirations too soon. Once he has tired of uniting the singers in beautifully calculated chords, he tries canon between the voices (six bars in this piece show Schumann to have been a master of imitative counterpoint). He then allows the accompaniment to step into what remains of the limelight: the last page of the song is a dialogue where piano interludes – dying falls where wilting minims droop over trailing accompanying triplets – alternate with languishing cadences from the voices. In other hands this formula might be embarrassingly sentimental, but Schumann perfectly conveys that inarticulate longing which is only able to express itself in a sigh or a murmur. The writing for piano and voices seem to dematerialise before our ears – an echo dying in the distance, dew evaporating on the flowers of the valley. This music is shy, but powerfully so: it shames countless operatic effusions for their crass lack of subtlety. Er und Sie is the high point of poetic fervour expressed in the form of the vocal duet, and it has scarcely ever been equalled in its genre, let alone surpassed.

Schumann must have been acutely aware of Schubert’s great strophic solo song of 1815, a powerful masterpiece printed on a single page. Was it for this reason that he could not bring himself to use the proper title of this poem (Goethe’s, as well as Schubert’s) which is Nähe des Geliebten (‘Nearness of the Beloved’)? It might have seemed presumptuous to compose his own Nähe des Geliebten. Yet Reichardt, Himmel, Zelter and Tomášek had all composed songs under this title; Medtner and Hindemith would again do so in the future, among others. Only Loewe wrote two versions of Ich denke dein (for solo voice Op 9, 1817, and a choral setting in 1823) which makes one wonder if Schumann knew the Loewe song first. Perhaps not, for that song attempts a different atmosphere and Bewegung for each strophe, while Schumann opts for a version where the strophic form is modified only to a small extent.

Another explanation for Schumann’s unwillingness to use the original title is that the gender of the beloved in Goethe’s grammatical construction (‘des Geliebten’) is masculine. Perhaps he preferred a title which made it possible to imagine Clara, not himself, as the central point of the lyric. Goethe wrote the poem in April 1795 as a result of hearing a song-setting of a Danish-German poetess named Friederike Brun (1765-1835) which began ‘Ich denke dein’. The music was by the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter. Goethe was so taken with the music that he took Brun’s poem, with its alternating long and short lines, and completely rewrote it to fit Zelter’s music afresh. This was in fact the very beginning of that remarkable friendship between Goethe and Zelter which was to ripen into old age. Goethe incorporated the new poem in a production of Claudine von Villa Bella in Weimar.

After playing with his listeners, and teasing us mercilessly with regard to complicated duet techniques, Schumann here opts for the Mendelssohnian model of vocal writing where the voices stick together and sing as if one voice, albeit in harmony of some adventurousness. A piano introduction is dispensed with here, probably because the Vorspiel to the Schubert song, a miracle of unfolding modulations, is one of the most famous preludes in all lieder. In contrast the Schumann song establishes itself with the minimal means – two notes of a triplet which scarcely give the singers time to cotton on to the song’s tonality. For the word ‘Ich’ the tenor has to find a C sharp out of the blue as part of a fervent upbeat for ‘denke’ which is a second inversion of a G major chord. This sets the tone for the unexpected turns in a duet which is an early experiment in the harmonic manner of Schumann’s final period.

It is almost impossible to believe that this music should be so different in style from its predecessors which were composed only a few days before. The piano is no longer a ‘character’ in this music, with its own commentary (as in the preceding song for example). It is true that it is allowed a perfunctory echo of the vocal line at ‘vom Meere strahlt’ (and similar places in other verses) but this is the only moment when we are conscious of its separate identity. The dense texture of triplets and dotted rhythms, sometimes incorporating descant notes in right-hand melody, resembles string quartet writing in that it seems layered into four parts on the page. Above this the voices unite in an impassioned and unanimous outpouring: these two lovers are as one and the problems of jealousy and distance of the previous songs have been surmounted.

The composer aims to spin a continuous melody – which is problematic when setting a poem in rather short repetitive strophes. He achieves this by avoiding a return to G major at the end of the first verse which would have limited the song’s harmonic horizons somewhat: the words ‘Quellen malt’ are accordingly accompanied by E minor harmony which shifts briefly to the song’s dominant (D major) before the second verse begins. The music for this is an exact repeat of the first, and ‘Wandrer bebt’ once again slips into E minor to avoid a conventional close.

For the third strophe Schumann has planned something special. By flattening the C sharp that has featured in the first two strophes (so that we now hear ‘ich höre dich’ on a C natural which uncannily suggests sharpened aural perception) the composer steers the music into A minor which is followed by a bright, almost celebratory C major to paint the waves of the sea. At ‘die Welle steigt’ the vocal line rises to its most dramatic, and then there is the sudden contrast of ‘im stillen Haine’ where the piano’s throbbing triplets are suddenly reined back to piano. The modulation into B major at ‘wenn alles schweigt’ takes us into harmonic realms which are distant enough from the home key to invoke awestruck silence, but not so far away as to make it impossible to slide swiftly back into G major realms for the final strophe.

The concluding verse begins very much as had the first two; at first we assume that Schumann has opted for a straightforward AABA structure for this song. But that is to reckon without the new inspiration for a coda that he would gather from the idea of sunset and star-rise. We hear both these things in new music which he finds for the slightly melancholy fall of the vocal line at ‘die Sonne sinkt’ and the suddenly giddy rise of ‘leuchten mir die Sterne’. In the tiny moment of piano commentary that follows this the pianist’s little finger is permitted to prick out a solitary star in the treble register. After this, soulful repetitions of ‘O wärst du da’, followed by a wistful two-bar postlude, bring the song to a close.

This is perhaps the least sung of Schumann’s duets and one can see why. An initial read-through can be disappointing, and the music can appear awkward and stiff on first acquaintance, certainly not as immediately attractive as other Schumann ensembles. This is even more the case if one takes the ‘Langsam’ marking too literally. On the other hand a more flexible approach which allows the music to rise and fall according to the sense of the words (it is this rubato, or give and take, which can often bring the music of the composer’s late style into sharper focus) reveals a passionate little masterpiece, and a setting thoroughly worthy of Goethe’s great poem.

‘Ich denke Dein’ belongs to Schumann’s musical celebration of Goethe at the mid-century mark. The composer, who knew Schubert’s immortal 1815 setting ‘Nähe des Geliebten’, D162, chose duet texture rather than solo song, gave his work a different title, and abjured any piano introduction at all (Schubert’s setting begins with one of his most beautiful introductions), surely in part to minimize the inevitable comparisons. The two lovers sing as if glued together in perfect passion while the piano accompaniment spins a continuous melody throughout. In a duet that alternates between minor mode and its relative major, Schumann creates moments of particular beauty: when the lovers listen to the quiet meadow, rapt attention rendered in harmony, and at the end, when the sun sinks and the stars begin to shine.

Schumann found Hebbel’s poem in the Gedichte (pages 132/3) issued in 1842 by Hoffman und Campe (also Heine’s publishers), a volume which Schumann added to his library in July 1847. Here the title is simply Wiegenlied, so the idea about it being addressed to a sick child is entirely Schumann’s. Indeed, the composer purposely misses out the first verse of the poem (which makes it clear that the child is smiling in its cradle after having been a handful to its mother all day). This creates a duet scenario for troubled parents and points to an autobiographical slant to the music.

Another important change is that Hebbel specifies the sex of the child who is a little boy or ‘Knäblein’. Schumann prefers the more general ‘Kindlein’ which would allow the child to be of either sex. We note that Clara and Robert had already suffered a bereavement with the death of their son Emil who was born in Dresden in February 1846, and died in June the following year. This reminds us that infant mortality was a fact of life in every nineteenth-century home, and that fortitude in loss was something which every mother and father had to steel themselves to acquire. At the time of the composition of this duet, in September 1849, there were five surviving Schumann children: the eldest, Marie (1841-1929), had turned eight three days earlier; Elise (1843-1928) had her sixth birthday in April; Julie (1845-1872) had her fourth birthday in March; the first birthday of Ludwig (1848-1899) was in January 1849, and Ferdinand (1849-1891) was one-and-a-half months old. Eugenie Schumann (1851-1938) was yet to be born, as was the couple’s youngest child, the ill-starred Felix Schumann (1854-1879), future poet of Brahms’s Meine Liebe ist grün. Clara was to lose Julie, Felix and Ferdinand before she died in 1896.

This duet might have applied to any one of this brood who were all subject to various childhood sicknesses. It is possible that the poet’s ‘Knäblein’ in this context would have conjured too many painful memories of poor little Emil. The music is simple and heartfelt. The bleak E minor tonality and the brooding dactylic rhythm suggests anxiety. (Schumann’s elegiac Aus den hebräischen Gesängen is also in E minor.) And one can never forget that Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen progresses in this ominous metre where the quantities (long-short-short) suggest the advance of an ominous force of nature. Another factor in the music is the use of tiny dissonances in the right-hand chords of the accompaniment which must have sounded rather more anguished in 1849; each clash and crunch may be thought to betoken a line or wrinkle on a parent’s furrowed brow. Outside, the midday heat, and the sight of a cherry tree with its ripe fruit, betoken a healthy childhood. The sudden shifts to the submediant realms of C major (another similarity with Aus den hebräischen Gesängen) and then to the even more distant E flat major, perfectly suggest how unattainable are these Elysian fields of normality for the sick child. The drowsiness of ‘Draussen rot im Mittagsscheine’, supported by triplets which rustle in the accompaniment, is not only appropriate to the idea of sleep; it also evokes a vision seen through the eyes of someone running a high temperature. The same applies to the similar passage at ‘Immer süsser kocht die Sonne’ where mention of heat and thirst seems to reinforce the idea of a fever.

The refrain of ‘Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf’ is heard once in the major key, as if mother and father had momentary reason to believe they could detect an improvement in the child’s condition. There is an immediate return, however, to the minor key at the song’s halfway point. What happens next amounts to a strophic repetition of what has gone before – the song is essentially a very simple one. At the end we have moved into G major again, and there the song fades away with the implication that the parents are tentatively reassured that all will be well. The four-bar postlude includes the word ‘Schlaf’ intoned twice in whispered benediction. The inclusion of two hushed C major chord in this context, a plagal cadence evocative of church music, leaves us in no doubt of the role played by prayer in circumstances such as these. Before the age of penicillin or antibiotics, divine intervention was the sole remaining hope for many a panic-stricken parent. It is significant that these C major chords are minims, the only moments of true stillness in a piece which is otherwise always on the move. The implication is, surely, that in this touch-and-go situation the march of death, represented by those creeping dactyls, has been stilled, if only for the time being.